In a new post on his blog, Kore Nordmann takes a look at a feature that's been around a long time (first introduced in a message board application) - BBCodes.

The discussion on my blog post "Do not use regular expressions for parsing" ended in a discussion about BBcodes in general. I just used them as an example to demonstrate why it it is impossible to parse such a language with regular expressions - and mentioned in a subclause, that I don't see any sense in using them at all.

He looks at some of the myths surrounding them and their use (more secure, easier to use, safer than HTML) and gives some reasons for making teh choice of HTML over them.